Why must BBC1 Saturday night dramas be done in costume? Can't drama happen in a jumper and jeans?

There will be many who'd say stuff happens even if you're wearing Gap chinos, but try telling that to the Beeb. So many of their primetime Saturday dramas wallow in shaky history and are clogged with costume. Just as Sunday night drama belongs to genteel togs, the protagonists of Saturday night's offerings come bedecked in medallions and tiaras. There will be stocky men in leather jerkins. People will carry flaming torches and peer around corners.

It happened with Robin Hood and Merlin and here we are again with Atlantis which ticks the same tiresome boxes. Is it only crime dramas which may occur in modern dress, with everything else be tarted up with clanking jewellery and torchlight?

There was plenty of flame in the opening scenes of Atlantis, then in the remainder of the show, too. Indeed, most of it seemed to be filmed in semi-darkness with the screen illuminated only by firelight and the occasional glint of a sweaty shoulder. In this moody darkness it was hard to tell what was going on, and the dialogue was of no assistance, being mostly cliches lifted straight from the Ladybird Book of Screenwriting, like 'We have to get out of here', 'I will not fail you', 'May the gods be with you', 'Embrace your destiny.' I could write better dialogue! So could you. So could that budgie you had when you were eight.

So if the setting was mostly dark, and the dialogue hardly revealing, perhaps the action would hint at what was happening. Not really. People kept announcing they were at war, but who are these people? Who's at war and with whom, and why? Perhaps you had to watch Series 1 to know this, but I'm too aware that life is short, so I won't be indulging in that particular pleasure.

At one point a woman was unlocked from a trunk and ran through the castle. Perhaps this would reveal a plot development? It didn't. A guard stepped out of the shadows and cried 'Halt!' (another cliche, this one taken from Page 7 of the Ladybird book) and then some kind of pterodactyl appeared and there were more sweaty swordfights by torchlight.

This was simply a poor man's Game of Thrones; a cheap British copy lacking the huge budget, the dragons and the incest.

A lot of it was entirely predictable too. Our heroes spare the life of a baddy only for said baddy to reappear later to kill them. Well of course he did. Later, as they flee across a rickety rope bridge, they turn and hack at the ropes to stop the baddies chasing them. Well, of course they did. It's been done before. All of these scenes, and the costumes and tiresome dialogue…it's all been done before.

There is nothing new here, but then I remind myself that it's Saturday night primetime BBC1. Of course there's nothing new. Switch to ITV and they're at it too, showing the same thing they've been showing for years in this slot. It's Saturday night. Those who're tuning in don't want innovation, they want a princess with a sword and a heaving bosom or, on ITV, a bland singer for whom music is 'like, everyfin'' and he's going to give it 'like, 110%'.

People don't want change on Saturday night primetime and that's why it's so often dull. Forced to watch its latest offering today, I felt like one of the characters from Atlantis, wanting to yell, let's get out of here!